Strategic Marketing

So, in this section, what I want to focus on is an introduction of aframework that I think you'll find very useful for figuring outhow to think competitively to become aleader in your market.

And what I'm going to go over is based ona book that was written by Tracy andWiersema it's called Market Leadership. And its based off of their framework,although I've adapted it some.

And, the framework or the, well I'm goingto think of it as kind of the graph or the strategic tool, isbased on a set of principles. These principles have to be true and you have tobelieve in them in order for this framework to work. And they're very strong principles.

They're very strong assumptions. I don't think they're that controversial,but they'renot vague, they really are very strong,andin order for this technique to work, youreally need to abide by them. And the first one is; that you have toknow your markets. Now before I mentioned a lot of, mostbusinessesare now in customer fosed market, customerfocused marketing. That is the type of marketing mostbusinesses are doing. because most businesses are verycompetitive, they're global. There's a lot of competition out there andthe only way they're going to win in their marketplace is to focus on the customer. So, that's a very important principal in this framework, it says, in order touse this framework, we are going to assume that you know what your customers want. And furthermore, you know how your competitors are likely to react. And so what you are trying to do is what I mentioned that principle of differentiation. You're trying to find a way to provide customer value, better than the competition. And the only way you can really deliver this. Is to know your market. So you. And you can't just guess. You have to do market research and you have to reallyunderstand what your customers want andhow your competition's likely to react. So that's the first principle.

The second principle and this is whereit's pretty, it's a pretty defined and pretty It's a definiteassumption that's being made. And the assumption says and what I've written here is customers have the final say. And what that means is the customers are going to choose what they want. But the assumption is a strong assumption becausewe assume the customers go through this decision process. They look at all the data and all the valuesand all the attributes and all the products in the market. And, there's so much information out there. That they can't consider everything. And, so what they do is they kind of chunk a bunch of different thingstogether into kind of three bundles.

And the three bundles are. One is all sorts of operations factors. Which includes price and cost. But delivery, service, reliability, those, all ofthose kinds of things are considered operational things.

The other bundle is product features or designs, so product attributes style,innovation, technology and they put that in another bundle.

And the third bundle is. Whether or not it meets my needs, so is it customized to meet my needs? And what the customers have the final says,is that customers look at these three, they kind of classifythe products into these three bundles andthey kind of givethem a score in each one of these three dimensions.